One woman who knew what it was like to wait on God was Hannah. In 1 Samuel 1:7 we read that Hannah endured both the shame of being childless and the provocation of her rival wife. “So it went on year by year,” the Bible says matter-of-factly. Even after she cried in prayer to the Lord and Eli the priest blessed her petition, she still had to wait. In verse 20, it says “in due time” Hannah conceived and bore a son. We don’t know exactly how long that was, but it still took some time.

In "The Art of Divine Contentment," Puritan author Thomas Watson notes one very important aspect of how Hannah handled her emotions during the wait: “When any burden is upon the spirit, prayer gives vent, it easeth the heart. Hannah's spirit was burdened; ‘I am’ says she, ‘a woman of a sorrowful spirit.’ Now having prayed, and wept, she went away, and was no more sad; only here is the difference between a holy complaint and a discontented complaint; in the one we complain to God, in the other we complain of God.”

Casting Our Cares

Are we not, then, to have cares or concerns? Of course we still have them. But contentment comes from knowing where we can take our concerns and who cares for our concerns. As it says in 1 Peter 5:6-7 (NIV): “Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you” (emphasis added). What are we to do in the “due time”? We are to give our anxieties to God and wait patiently because we know He cares for us.
 
A content woman is not impatiently proud. Contentment calls for humility. We have to intentionally humble ourselves under God’s mighty hand when our circumstances don’t work out to our liking. Without a doubt, it is humbling to go year after year with a hope deferred! It’s very humbling to keep showing up at family events as the only single sibling, or to go to the wedding of a former boyfriend without a date. But we have to remember that, as Christian women, we’re not here to promote our personal success stories, anyway. We’re here as trophies of grace — broken clay jars carrying around incredibly valuable treasure. Even if the Lord should grant our petition for marriage and a family, our witness and purpose do not change. Only our circumstances change.

Finally, as single women, I think we can take special comfort from Paul’s words. He learned to be content in whatever the circumstances, and singleness was among them. When he wrote that he had learned contentment in all things, he was a single man, imprisoned in chains! I appreciate this description from an article about contentment in the Journal of Biblical Counseling:

One hesitates to include singleness in a list of Paul’s problems, since he did not view it as a problem. Nevertheless, undesired or unexpected singleness surely provided temptations for discontentment in Paul, and it has been a problem for many people since him.